He aling powers At the moment I am retouching little blemishes in Photoshop, because I am not sure whether it works so well in Lightroom. What do you think?

I did exactly what you are doing for years, taking the image worked on in Lightroom into Photoshop in order to make a few final touches to it. Not any more. While Photoshop’s Clone and Healing Brush tools are very sophisticated, for the type of

1 minor blemish ‘cleaning’ I do, I find that Lightroom 5 or 6 do a very good job.

To be fair, if you want to clone a large area, I think Photoshop is better suited to the job – but since I have neither the patience or the finesse to ever clone out larger areas from an image,

2 I am 100% satisfied with what Lightroom can do for me.

If you go into the Lightroom Spot Removal Tool by tapping Q on your keyboard, you will see that it drops down a little pane that has both Clone and Heal options. There are also separate sliders for Size, Feather and Opacity. While the Clone tool can be an option on occasions, I find I rarely use it, as the Heal option works much more seamlessly and requires very little extra control from me.

Using the Clone tool, I will simply move around an image, like the shot of the swans I

3 am using as an example, and take out small marks. It works brilliantly for minor dust marks found on the sensor. You simply drop the brush over the mark so it is just fractionally larger and allow Lightroom to intelligently sample from a different area and blend that sample in.

You are not restricted to little circles either: you can drag in a line over any area that you want to heal. If at any point you decide you don’t like the sample that Lightroom has taken, you can just click on the sample to make it active and move it anywhere you like.